Owned by Ron and Robert Putman, Major is technically a feral feline. They have been taking care of him for 5 years, but he remains timid. They assume he came from an abusive environment before settling in their back yard. They made him a little house to sleep in, but Major prefers lounging on the brick steps and watching the little flock of chickens. He never bothers the chickens. He almost protects them.

Although, from what they've told me...I think Major is a girl (sshhh).

Yesss all that fur! Though the blurry background is a very non-detailed relief.

I would if I could! My eyesight is SO bad that I wouldn't be able to see the colors on my palette without them (let alone the palette...I'd be poking my brush on the table thinking "why am I not getting any paint?!") ROFL!

I didn't mean you should paint without your glasses on all the time. (Painting without paint, oh no!) I couldn't do that, either. Maybe just take it off a few times in between, just to see how the coloured areas look like.

Thank you! It's actually more complicated than just grey and white. Think 7 greys, then white. There's very little white, it's mostly light greys. The darkest color you see along his belly was the color Major started as. I painted every hair in a slightly lighter grey, then painted the hairs again in another lighter grey, an even lighter grey, and so on. I left some areas darker to create shadows, and continued brighter to create highlights. It takes quite a bit of time (this painting took 31 hrs, most of which was the kitty.) Layering many values create depth. It may be pain staking at first but once you get into the pattern it's quite easy.

Thanks for explaining that to me. I'm always looking for new ways to paint things so I appreciate that. My art teacher had me do things always the same exact way. White fur always started as blue and then just add white strokes ontop of it and some darker grey for shadows. She wsn't a very good teacher once you got bast basic concepts. Anyway, amazing job!

My pleasure! My art teacher was TERRIBLE, she didn't teach very much (inattentive and a bit jealous of talented students.) I learned my fur painting techniques from a book called "Painting Wildlife Step-by-Step." It's a good book to learn basics of every type of animal texture. Sounds like you have the basic concept already though. Just keep playing with the idea and painting realistically will become second nature.